Looking through my spam folder I came across the subject “Make your love wand function better”. At first I wondered what a love wand function might be - something similar to a hash function maybe? It took me more than two seconds to realize that “function” is not used as a noun but as a verb in that imperative sentence.
All I can say is: The horse raced past the barn fell and time flies like an arrow.
MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson, whose blog “Shtetl-Optimized” I highly recommend, just found out that an advertising company used some lines out of one of his lectures in a commercial for Ricoh printers, without giving him any kind of credit, much less compensation. The dialogue, copied nearly verbatim, runs as follows:
Model 1: But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense - if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves - then what is it about?
Model 2: Well, from my perspective, it’s about information, probabilities, and observables, and how they relate to each other.
Model 1: That’s interesting!
I found the last line rather lame, compared to possible alternatives like “Hmm, let me think about that for a bit”, “Could you explain that in more detail?” or, my personal favorite, “That’s a bunch of crap!”. Scott was quick to point out that that line was the only one in the commercial he didn’t write.
SuperMag is a magnet construction kit and it’s lots of fun. I have even written a webpage about it with lots of examples, tips, and tricks. SuperMag is similar to GeoMag, which appears to be somewhat more widely known. The main difference is that SuperMag has two different lengths of bars which makes it possible to build a larger variety of structures without resorting to the panel approach GeoMag has taken. Not that I’m saying that GeoMag is bad - they’re both great, just different.
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